Home / Blog / Lifetime Blueprint
LIFETIME BLUEPRINT
What Are the Main Areas of Life, and How Do You Score Them?
Part of the series The Eight Domains of Life, Scored: The Complete Guide
The short answer: Most systems for looking at a whole life divide it into roughly eight areas: health, mind, faith, family, relationships, work, money and growth. There are other reasonable ways to cut it.
What actually matters is far less exciting than the list itself: you need a defined scale, so that a 3 this year means the same thing as a 3 in five years, otherwise nothing is comparable.
Try it: score your own eight areas with the free life scoring tool.
Why eight, and why the exact list matters less than you think
Any division of a life is arbitrary at the edges. Some models use six, some use ten, some separate career from money or fold faith into meaning. The reason to pick one and stop adjusting it is comparability. A category you renamed three years ago has quietly destroyed the only thing the exercise was producing.
The scale is the actual work
Without a definition, scoring is a mood reading. Decide in advance what a 3 looks like in each area, what a 7 looks like, and what a 10 would mean. Write those descriptions down once, then score against them rather than against how the week went. This is the single change that turns life-scoring from a journaling exercise into measurement.
Score honestly, not aspirationally
Two failure modes, both common. Scoring high because you know what the number should be, and scoring low because you are having a hard week and it feels appropriately humble. Both destroy the data. The description you wrote for a 7 is the referee, not your mood on the day.
Look at the shape, not the total
Adding the scores up is meaningless. What is worth reading is the shape: which areas are carrying the others, which one has been sliding for three years without anyone noticing, and whether the strong ones got that way at the expense of a weak one. That pattern is usually the whole finding. Related: working out your values honestly and the yearly review itself.
Lifetime Blueprint
A hardcover life-design system: eight domains scored across the decades, reflections on every era, and letters to the people who come after.
What are the eight areas of life?
Commonly health, mind, faith, family, relationships, work, money and growth. Other models split them differently, and the specific list matters less than using the same one consistently.
How do you rate different areas of your life?
Define in writing what a 3, a 7 and a 10 look like in each area, then score against those descriptions rather than against your current mood. Without a defined scale the scores are not comparable over time.
What are the life domains?
Life domains are the same thing as areas of life: the categories a life divides into for scoring and planning. The common set is eight: health, family, love, friends, work, money, growth, and play. Some systems merge or split them, but every workable set covers those bases.
More on Lifetime Blueprint
- Your Twenties: The Decade of Compounding Choices
- Your Thirties: The Building Decade, When Time Starts to Feel Finite
- Your Forties Are a Recalibration, Not a Crisis
- Your Fifties: The Distillation Decade, Subtraction Over Addition
- Why Most People Will Never Write Their Life Down
The method behind every book
- Which 365-Day Book Should I Start With? A One-Minute Guide
- What Is a No Zero Day? The Rule That Saves a Bad Week
- What Is a Realistic Morning Routine? Two Minutes, Not Two Hours
All articles about Lifetime Blueprint → · The book page → · All the books →
written by the author, at the kitchen table, after work.